I shrugged. “You had me worried,” I said.
“Look, ol’ buddy, I’d like to make amends,” he said. “It would make me feel a whole lot better if you accepted a lift in my truck to where you’re going.”
I said I wasn’t sure where that might be since I didn’t know which of the several resort islands in Maine the kidnappers had taken Molly.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he said, “or my name isn’t King Buck, which in fact it used not to be. You have to let me make it up to you. Please.” He got down on one knee as if he was proposing.
Sober, he seemed harmless enough, and so, not without some residual reluctance, I accepted his offer.
“What kind of cargo do you carry?” I asked him.
“The female of the species,” he said with a wry smile.
We hadn’t gone very far when we hit a bump in the road and I noticed, in what must been a subliminal flash, inadvertently turning my head, a braceleted human arm spilling out from the tarp in the back that secured his otherwise hidden cargo.
58th Night
The trucker, who insisted I call him Buck, kept up a kind of jokey patter as we drove toward Vinalhaven, the first island on our itinerary, his third beer clutched in the hand that was unattached to the wheel. When we started out, Buck had warned me that it was dangerous to let him drink beyond his limit.
I thought this might be the time to say something.
“You probably have had enough, don’t you think?” I said, putting my caution as delicately as I could.
“Where did you get the idea that a few beers was going to make some kind of fucking monster out of me?” he said in a voice I hadn’t heard before except perhaps outside my door.
“It’s what you told me,” I said.
“I told you that?” he asked the now-empty bottle in his hand. “I guess I must be some kind of liar, huh?”
“I think I see her,” I said, pointing to a twentyish blond just ahead, carrying a package under her arm. “You can drop me here if that’s convenient.”
The truck drove up to the woman so that Buck could get a better look at her. “Not too bad,” he said, “but I think we can do better.”
“I can get out anywhere here,” I said, ignoring his odd remark.
A man came from the other direction and took the package from the woman and they went off together, arms around each other.
“What do you want to do about that?” he said as he trolled after the couple in his truck. “If she were my wife…” He left the thought unfinished.
“The sun must have been in my eyes,” I said. “I can see now that she’s not Molly.”
“It’s good you said something,” he said, chugging his fourth beer, “because, hey, I was going to run that pretty boy down for you. Just kidding. Just as well. There’s a causeway up ahead to the island. Don’t worry. I’m not going to drop you before we get what we came for. Zum zum.”
By this point, I was more than eager to get away from him but I could see that asking to be dropped off was a sure way not to get me what I wanted.
The island was larger than I imagined it would be. I did know from remarks Molly had made that the kidnappers were in possession of a lodge near the central marina.
There were two attractive women in a Cadillac convertible that pulled alongside us and Buck, keeping pace, danced his tongue at them in obscene gesture.
“Asshole,” the one in the passenger seat called to him.
We followed them in the truck, kept them in sight for much of the time by going twenty miles or so an hour over the posted speed limit. They lost us briefly, but then we found their car in the parking lot of a seafood restaurant called Paradise One.
Buck parked the truck at the side of the road about 100 feet past the restaurant. He laid out a plan, which didn’t make a lot of sense that had me going into the restaurant and convincing the women to join us in the truck.
I opened my door and I was getting ready to swing my legs over the side when he grabbed my arm. “You’re coming back, with the babes or without, right?”
“Uh huh,” I said.
“I’m not going to have to go in after you, am I?” he said, digging his fingers into my arm.
“Look, Buck,” I said, pulling my arm free, “I’m not afraid of you.”
He glared sternly at me, then in seeming slow motion, tears began to fall, big sloppy tears sluicing down his meaty face. I was appalled.
Before more tears spilled, I was out of the cab and working my way toward the Paradise restaurant and eventually inside. It was an overlit, undersubscribed place specializing, from what I could tell based on the plates that passed my way, in extravagant portions.
A cursory glance of the room did not readily reveal the two women I had been assigned to approach. What it did reveal was that Molly (or a woman who could have been her sister) was in a booth at the back with two men of disparate ages I had never seen before. She was sucking at the claw of a lobster.
She hadn’t seen me, or hadn’t let on that she had, and I took a booth which allowed, from a discreet distance, a privileged view of Molly’s area of the room.
So as not to stick out, I ordered a fish burger — the waitress said it was the Specialty of the Maison — with home made generic cole slaw and sweet potato fries.
The longer I looked at Molly’s back, the less sure I was that it was actually her. This lingering doubt proved an appetite depressant, so I decided to visit the Men’s Room by way of Molly’s table. In a neighboring booth were the two sexy women we had followed to the restaurant and they smiled in my direction as I passed.
I had almost reached Molly’s booth when Buck appeared, sporting a sawed-off shotgun he had extracted before our eyes from under his red flannel shirt. “This is a stick-up,” he announced. “You put your hands on the table where I can see them and no one will get hurt.” He was so drunk he teetered from side to side, his open fly a cavern of false hope, as he slurred his announcement.
The small crowd ignored the outburst, went on eating as if nothing untoward had taken place, as if no plug-ugly six-foot-six intruder waving a shotgun had abruptly forced his way into their lives.
59th Night
When Buck started spraying the room with buckshot, those of us who weren’t dead or immobilized got down under the tables to protect ourselves.
As soon as his ammunition ran out, Buck was taken into custody by a team of local police. Only to be released a few hours later when word came down that he was an undercover government agent on a mission so secret that only those in the highest of high places knew what he was about.
In the meantime, I got to be comforted by the two attractive women from the Cadillac convertible in the circumscribed space under their table.
When the shooting stopped and Buck was subdued, when the dust cleared and the wounded were carted away, Molly and her two male companions were nowhere to be found.
My new friends and I exchanged stories and, finding one another sympathetic, we decided to make common cause. Toni and Win (Antonia and Winifred) had gone off on a vacation from stultifying domesticity — this was four years ago to the week — and for a conspiracy of circumstances had reached a point of no return. After running out of money, they kept themselves going by robbing convenience stores, limiting their thefts to basic necessities.
It was this moral component in their circumstantial life of crime that won me over to their predicament.
My story was as it had been: I was on a self-determined mission to rescue a former wife from her seemingly companionable kidnappers.